Nyssa Chow is an oral historian, multidisciplinary artist, and writer. She has served as core faculty at the Oral History Masters Program at Columbia University for seven years, teaching oral history theory and practice, literary nonfiction, and documentary arts. She is a Visiting Scholar at The Humanities Council at Princeton University.

Chow was an Assistant Professor in the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative (MDOCS) and Film and Media department at Skidmore College, teaching interdisciplinary documentary arts. She was a Research Affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at MIT Media Labs (Poetic Justice Group led by artist Ekene Ijeoma), and a co-director of the NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative, and Memory Project at Columbia University (I.N.C.I.T.E). She was the Lead Artist Facilitator for the DocX Labs at The Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University, co-created with documentarian Stephanie Owens. The DocX Fellowship was founded to support BIPOC artists in the documentary arts. She was the 2019-2021 Princeton Arts Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts and has served as Lecturer in the Creative Writing Department at Princeton University, as Visiting Faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard), as Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University, and as Visiting Assistant Professor in the BFA Film Program at Purchase College. 

Chow was the 2018 Recipient of the PEN/Jean Stein for Literary Oral History won for the immersive literary oral history project The Story of Her Skin. This project also won the Columbia University Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. Her essay How to Become a Monster, published in Ploughshares Literary Journal, received a Special Mention in Nonfiction in the 2020 Pushcart Prize Anthology. She was a finalist for the 2023 Narratively Profile Award for literary nonfiction.  Chow has collaborated with filmmakers and artists, most recently with Jennifer Wen Ma on the exhibition An Inward Sea for the New Britain Museum of Art. Their current collaboration with artist Daniel Arturo Almeida, an expansion of The Inward Sea: Oral History, earned fiscal sponsorship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). Her solo exhibition Still, Life., a series of installations using sound, light, and assemblage, was held at Gallery One in Trinidad. Her artwork Trace: A Memorial was featured in the group exhibition ‘How We Remember’ at the Miriam and Ira D Wallach Art Gallery in New York City. Her work will be featured in the upcoming exhibition (2024) hosted by The LatinX Project.

Chow has conducted oral histories on behalf of arts institutions such as the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution and has lectured widely on the intersection of art and oral history, embodied knowledge and listening, and literary oral history.

Nyssa was born in Trinidad and is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA Film program and Columbia University's Oral History Masters Program.